Of course, the use bytes / length() solution is not perfect (just see my examples [5] and [6] above). But it is a reasonable approach considering that we do not know what the OP's $xmldata is and that "normal" users are usually not fiddling with the UTF-8 flag.

In reply to Re^9: Determining content-length for an HTTP Post by WizardOfUz
in thread Determining content-length for an HTTP Post by Anonymous Monk

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